The University of Notre Dame asks in its promotional videos “What would you fight for?” The rhetorical question expresses a proud institutional commitment to stand for what is right, good, and true. However, in their decision earlier this year to cover a dozen murals depicting the life of Columbus, the school president, Father John Jenkins, … Read more
Last week, Jordan Peterson, who is currently the world’s top public intellectual, had his fellowship offer to the University of Cambridge revoked. On March 20, Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity issued the following statement on Twitter: “Jordan Peterson requested a visiting fellowship at the Faculty of Divinity, and an initial offer has been rescinded after a … Read more
Editor’s note: The following essay by Professor Kengor is considerably longer than the typical Crisis article. We try to be mindful of the reading habits of our Internet audience which tends to favor shorter pieces. However, Professor Kengor’s essay is original, timely, well-documented, and very readable. Crisis welcomes the lively discussion and debate it will … Read more
The culture war drags on and Christians are in the crosshairs. Defending the faith and our right to present our case in the marketplace of ideas requires a sober analysis of our opponents’ strategies. In this battle we are confronting a coalition of activists, who insist that their ideologies cannot be challenged and anyone who … Read more
It’s springtime, and fairness is in the air. And we’re choking on it. Everywhere we turn, fairness. Wherever so-called microaggressions and cultural appropriation are condemned or when the University of California bans phrases like “land of opportunity,” it is done in the name of fairness. #LoveWins or #MeToo—fairness. Open borders—fairness. Like a thirsty man at … Read more
This article is a continuation of the previous, written on behalf of Michael Smalanskas, the brave student at Providence College who posted a sign affirming reality: because the Catholic teaching that only a man and a woman can feasibly marry is but a plain recognition of what is biologically, physically, and anthropologically the case. We … Read more
I wrote the following several weeks ago, and decided to wait on it. Meanwhile, something has happened to the young man in question, something worse by far than what I have described here. So here goes: I have just learned that the Women’s Studies Program at my old school, Providence College, does not take rape seriously. Or … Read more
I’m grateful to Holy Cross for the education I received there years ago, but I can’t help but think that its current identity crisis will negatively affect the quality of the education and formation it now provides. In response to “growing anti-Muslim tensions” in the United States, Holy Cross initiated a yearlong discussion to decide whether … Read more
On June 27, 2017 there came an announcement that was remarked upon for all the wrong reasons. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, proclaimed to the world that the social network had 2 billion users online. Simply a sign of a successful business venture? Merely also a sign of the times in which we live? To … Read more
At the school where I used to teach, diversity has become the word of faith, an intellectual idol to conjure by. It does not mean that you study a variety of cultures. It couldn’t mean that. Otherwise we would have been in very Diversity Heaven, as we introduced our students to ancient Babylon, Homeric Greece, … Read more
Ever since former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling before preseason games in 2016, taking a knee in protest has become all the rage among the self-styled athletic elite. Spreading out from Kaepernick’s banal act of “defiance,” more and more players on more and more teams began refusing to stand for the playing … Read more
With sonorous tones on the annual Founder’s Day in my school, the Reverend Sub-Dean clad in his academicals would slowly recite the long list of those who had contributed of their substance over the years. The Very Reverend Dean kept sober vigil from his stall. The roster was long because the annals were long, and the … Read more
For generations, football was the most unpolitical and un-ideological of pastimes in America. Indeed, it was a point of unity that overcame political differences and fostered healthy local rivalries. Not liking football was almost un-American. Now times are changing in our nation. Nothing can be left untouched by the liberal keepers of the culture. Even … Read more
In a distant place and a distant time, there lived an enlightened king. He was a righteous and forward-looking man who cared deeply about his kingdom and its subjects. Because he was enlightened he could see what others could not. Unlike others, he clearly saw that the past only shackled the future. In seeing the … Read more
A senior software engineer at Google sent a memo around the company arguing that Google had created an “ideological echo chamber,” writing that “Google has several biases and honest discussion about these biases is being silenced by the dominant ideology.” Google’s response to the memo was to dispute it in word by proclaiming its commitment … Read more
To: All Google Employees From: Unoi’m Carasee, Vice President of Mutually Exclusive Propositions Subject: The Recent Outrage Dear Google Employees: In light of the horrific assault on Google values recently made by a former employee, we feel it is necessary to add a few further propositions to the official Google List of Mandatory Beliefs. In … Read more
During the last year of my employment at Nameless College, whose sharp turn away from its Catholic identity and its commitment to the humanities came as a shock to my foolish optimism, I learned of what Elizabeth Corey has shrewdly called “The First Church of Intersectionality.” You must understand, my sane and ordinary readers, that … Read more
The bromide of “being true to yourself” has found new life in gender studies, in the vertiginous celebration of the Supercilious Self, and in the concomitant denial of the “permanent things.” For example, Mount Holyoke College, in Massachusetts, proudly announces that “it welcomes applications for its undergraduate program from any qualified student who is female … Read more
A couple of months ago I was savaged on my campus on account of a title supplied by one of my editors: “My College Succumbed to the Totalitarian Diversity Cult.” I don’t know that Providence College has succumbed, but the next day somebody had written on the blackboard of my class, “Diversity is not a … Read more
In the span of a few years, the dictatorship of relativism has given way to the tyranny of political correctness. Under the first regime, universal truth was supplanted by personal truth; under the current one, it is exchanged for outright falsehood. Consider the rise of statements such as, Sexual orientation is inborn and fixed. Gender … Read more